October and November are my months. I spend them wanting to start a coven, start a new book, or start a bar fight. There’s just so much electricity in the air, and it’s glorious! The catch is for about two months I feel alive, magical, and often…well…I tend to vacillate between mystical exuberance and dick-in-the-dirt depression.
Autumn is the season of harvest, and I find myself introspecting even harder than usual – even ruminating, which is not exactly healthy. The year is shifting from light to dark, from a time of growth to one of decrease, and it begs the question: How’s my own harvest going? What all did I try to grow in the light seasons, and what was the result? It’s both a literal and figurative harvest – fruits and vegetables, hopes and dreams, plans and schemes.
As you likely know, Texas does not adhere to the traditional Western European Wheel of the Year. I don’t consider Autumn a time of slowing down – growth slows down, yes, but the heat just broke. The lightness in the air calls for celebration, socialization, and fun, however you define it. My birthday being in November just adds to that call. Also, though, I find myself wanting to start new things because with the Summer finally over it feels like I can move again. If you’ve never lived in oppressive heat (you probably will eventually, let’s be real) you may not know how hard it is to accomplish anything – even things that don’t require being outdoors! The energy of Texas Summer is so heavy and still that until the Autumn thunderstorms start up it’s like the sky is your own personal weighted blanket…or shroud.
So if you find yourself feeling a strange mix of excitement and sadness, don’t worry – it’s totally natural. Autumn is in many ways the out-breath of the year – just look at the trees. After the heat of Summer they seem to sigh and just let go in that way that nature makes look so easy but humans always manage to complicate. Nature urges us gently to release the months that have passed and be open to whatever is next, but you and I both know how hard that can be for us two-legged meaning-making animals. Hence the introspection and evaluation of Autumn – before we can release the light part of the year we have to go into our memories, our lists and plans, and stand looking out over the fields for a while.
A Little Magic
Mix together some cinnamon and sugar into their own little container; add a crystal of some sort to the bottom of the container if you like and charge the mixture with feelings of comfort, strength, and discernment. Add a pinch to your tea, coffee, or other hot beverages in the morning, and as you stir and sip, feel yourself taking in that energy. If you remember and/or want to, think to yourself: “May I be like the Autumn trees, who know how to let things go with ease.”
(Whoa, I actually rhymed something, has hell frozen over?)
Just to give you an idea of what I mean when I say spiritual inspiration can come from anywhere, here are some examples from my own practice.
1. I use prayer beads, which of course are common to many cultures; I designed my own system, however, so it’s not a mala or a rosary.
2. I light a flaming chalice on my altar to honor my UUism, which was one of the first ways I altered my way of doing things when I joined the church. The chalice is a traditional Pagan symbol, but to me the church’s flaming chalice is the light of reason in the embrace of spirit–a flame in a chalice. That’s just how I view it, though, everyone thinks of it a little differently as a symbol.
3. I smoke cleanse my space, but usually with stick incense for practical reasons. I have been known to use white sage but I’m not buying any more now that I understand how threatened the plant is becoming. I’d rather the tribes who use it in their own traditions have it. There are a couple of Native-made stick incenses that I’m willing to buy but no more bundles for this Witch.
4. The goddess that I interact with looks almost exactly like a celebrity (Sara Bareilles, please don’t tell her, lol). I have no idea why! I am a fan of her music but if we were going on fandom levels alone she’d be Taylor Swift. That would be truly weird.
5. When I envison magical energy I use a modified version of a concept I found in a fantasy novel (Gael Baudino’s Strands of Starlight, which calls it the Dance; I just call it the Web of Life). When “hooking up” to the Web (you can’t be disconnected from it but your awareness can be) I experience and imagine how, in the movie Pacific Rim, the Jager operators snap into their robots and enter the Drift (see gif below).
6. Not long ago I was doing a meditative journey and found myself in the Forest of Spirits, which is where I sometimes meet with Persephone, but instead someone else showed up, and we’ve met a few times since. I don’t think he’s a god, just a teacher-type entity–and at least in these meditations, he’s Dream of the Endless from The Sandman TV series on Netflix. We talk about working magic through the visualization of the Web of Life, and I’ve learned quite a bit about, as he calls it, dreamweaving.
Full disclosure, this may just be because I want to bang Morpheus like a Tibetan temple gong, but even so, the imagery works surprisingly well for me.
7. Over the years I’ve used imagery from witchy and ritual moments of Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Vampire Diaries, The Secret Circle, The Craft, Practical Magic, and Frozen 2 when casting circle or doing energy work. When I see something neat that looks like what I’m planning to do, I try it! If it moves me, I keep doing it. If not, I go back to my usual methods.
8. The images of Deity on my altar include a Funko Pop! of Te’Fiti from Moana.
Okay, so I couldn’t find the Pacific Rim gif I was looking for but I think you’ll agree this one is way better than anything I could have shown you related to the post.
Here’s a thought that immediately gets sneered at by a great many people in a surprising number of religions: You are under no obligation to devote yourself to “ancient” gods or archetypes. You are free to take inspiration from your own world, here and now, and your spiritual practices can come from new sources and even…*gasp* pop culture.
The fact is a lot of “old” deities can come with a lot of baggage and not really make sense in today’s world. As with many things it’s a matter of perspective.
Let’s say you’re drawn to the Greek goddess Hera. Hera comes from a patriarchal culture that frequently portrays her as a bitter, vengeful, and jealous wife, the embodiment of a dozen icky stereotypes about married (and all) women. But when you meditate on her, or contact her in some other way, you feel her strength and power, her refusal to let her husband’s flagrant infidelity and general rapey-ness go unchallenged. You find in her a modern feminist goddess, not a shrieking shrew.
So which Hera is “right?” If you find something in a deity or archetype that was not part of their ancient cultural makeup, are you still revering that same deity, or something new you’ve made up?
Many, many women perceive Persephone as a Queen and a woman who undergoes the descent into Hades willingly, not a kidnapped little girl being traded between male gods. Many argue that the myth existed in a more powerful form before the Greeks took it and turned her into a passive victim, but at what point does a deity stop being Greek and start being modern? At what point are we projecting our modern values onto something born from a completely different time? Is a sovereign Persephone valid?
If you are not a mythological purist or a historian my answer for you is, “Sure, why not?”
It is my opinion and experience that sometimes Deity comes to you in an inconvenient or weird form. In a lot of ways you can’t control it. If the Goddess is reaching out to you and looks suspiciously like Scarlet Witch from the MCU, and you vibe with that, well, why not work with her in that guise? If the way you envision magical energy is as the Force, why deny it? If the warrior traditions and mythos of the DS-9 Klingons gets your bat’leth buzzing, who am I to say you’re just “making stuff up?”
Psst…we’re all making stuff up to one degree or another. That’s beside the point. The point is that the sacred will come to you in ways that make sense to both of you – even if it takes you a while to figure out why exactly, or what that particular vision means to you. It may be meant to combat a stereotype or help a particular part of yourself evolve.
Not every deity or teacher is going to stay with you for life. Some come to us to show us something particular, to help us through trauma or processing an event, and then fade out so Someone Else can come in. We’re not all dedicated to a single face of Deity or even to a single pantheon. You may end up with a Goddess for every day of the week, or you may adore one your whole religious career.
That said, if you find yourself drawn to the spirits or deities of an existing culture (especially a historically oppressed culture, like most Indigenous tribes the world over), PLEASE do your homework, and consider very strongly whether “borrowing” one of those concepts or beings is okay for you. If you are a white person and you decide you just can’t bond with any deity except White Buffalo Woman you need to be prepared for the fact that you will be challenged on it – and rightly so.
There are thousands of faces of divinity and rituals to celebrate that divinity. There is no need to take from oppressed and closed cultures. Even those that aren’t necessarily closed, like Hinduism, should require you to respect that culture, the history of the deity, and the way They are revered by actual living people. There is a difference between appreciation and appropriation, but that difference relies on respect and education, which is YOUR responsibility. Other cultures don’t owe you a pass because you “have a Native friend.”
The cool thing is we don’t have to do any of that! Really consider what it is you’re trying to accomplish and how you could get that same result using tools that aren’t the spiritual property of people who have been victims of genocide, those very traditions ground beneath a colonizer’s boot. I bet you can find a way. It doesn’t have to have come from another existing tradition to work. It doesn’t have to be ancient to be valid.
The benefit of our form of cheerful syncretism is that we have an opportunity to create all new practices, traditions, and even gods rather than clinging to the old. But even if you are working with ancient deities from well-documented cultures like Greece, research and study are still paramount.
You may have gotten the idea that I believe gods are just archetypes, but that’s definitely not true. They are archetypes to a degree, but archetypes with centuries of history, myth, worship, and power behind them. After all, you were inspired to connect with that deity – that inspiration came from somewhere, right?
My experience has been that Deity is reaching back to us through those archetypes, and in that sense they are very real and often behave differently than they would if we just made them up out of nothing. We’re tapping into something very old and often very opinionated. Even when working with adaptations of modern and popular culture keep in mind that there is energy behind them, and often they hook into ancient archetypes and energies because that’s what humans are spiritually drawn to.
The gods are not just faces and names and a list of correspondences. Deity as a universal force is alive; it changes and dances like any other living thing.
So when you reach out to the universe and she reaches back, whatever she looks or sounds like, take some time and find out everything you can about that aspect of Deity, then proceed with both mirth and reverence. And be sure and ask her name; it’s only polite.
Most forms of Neopaganism use ritual tools to one extent or another, and a great many are similar across traditions. The nice thing about that is once you are familiar with the standard tool set and the general outline of Pagan rituals you can attend a Circle with just about any group and at least have a pretty good idea what’s going on.
Like most baby Witches I used to be really into the tools of the Craft (Except wands. I always felt silly using a wand.). Altar-building was and still is one of my favorite forms of sacred art. Taking down, cleaning, and rebuilding my altar is a very important ritual in my personal tradition (I even managed to make a video about it once!)…but now, in my 30th year as a Witchy type (holy smokes!), there are only a handful of tools I use, and most of them are only glancingly similar to the traditional Wiccan toolkit.
Most particularly I have left off the use the ritual blade common to most Neopagan trads, most often referred to as an athame. I have one that I have loved for decades, with a black blade and an ebony handle, but I just don’t use it anymore, mostly because I don’t do a lot of full-out ritual. I work in my bedroom, in a corner where my altar is a folding desk (in deference to my bad back and knees); I don’t usually cast a Circle any bigger than where I’m sitting. I can do that just fine without waving a knife around.
To me an athame is a fantastic tool for groups – it helps them focus energy, visualize the Circle, and be aware of the dual nature of power and responsibility. But as I practice 99% solitary my old pointy friend is currently wrapped up in my box full of old ritual cords, pendants, and other objects I’ve gathered on my spiritual travels.
I only have a few tools that I really use. What I do have a lot of are pretties – Goddess statues, including my collection of small figures that I call my Wee-ities; natural objects; altar cloths I change out seasonally (or whenever I feel like it), symbols of my particular brand of divinity; divinatory toys and accoutrements; and a framed image of Kore/Persephone by Anette Pirso that I turn depending on the season.
My Current Tool Lineup
Prayer Beads – I have two sets that I use, one for the darker half of the year and one for the lighter, although sometimes I just grab the strand that calls to me at the time. I made one and purchased the other online. They’re a powerful meditative tool for me and I have a number of prayer cycles, gathas, and mantra-type recitations that I use. I loosely based the original design of my handmade set on the Catholic Rosary – it has different sized/styled beads and several divisions to make counting easier rather than being a strand of all the same size like many malas. They’re also not loops – I don’t wear them or anything like that – just a straight line.
Chalice – but not one for drinking out of. It has a candle in it which I light every time I sit down at my altar (and sometimes just for comfort). The flaming chalice is the primary symbol of Unitarian Universalism. It has different meanings to different people; I think of it as the light of justice and knowledge held in the palm of the Goddess (since the chalice usually is treated as a feminine tool in the Craft), and looped in by diversity. (The two circles represented the Unitarians merging with the Universalists.)
I have two on my altar right now: One that my church gave me when I became a member, and a vintage one I bought that is the centerpiece of the altar. I do sometimes drink things in ritual but I’ll bring in a different vessel for that.
Pentacle – Mine is a flat wooden disk with the symbol painted on along with representations of the Elements and the Triple Moon. I made it myself from a plain wood piece. I use it primarily as a focus during spellwork; I place whatever I’m charging onto it and channel energy into the object through the pentacle. I also consider it the anchor point of my Circle, like its center of gravity.
Incense Burner – I am not a fan of charcoal tablet incense; it’s very evocative but it’s also high maintenance. I prefer sticks most of the time and have a small plant pot full of sand into which I stick a whole mess of sticks in different scents that I can just spark up whenever I want just to make the room smell and feel good. I also have a variety of purpose-made sticks for magical work.
Divinatory Tool – Most often I keep my Light Seer’s Tarot near to hand but sometimes I switch it out for the Shadowscapes deck.
Candles – There is a novena candle on either side of my altar that’s really just there for light. Those along with the light in the chalice are usually plenty to see by.
Dragon – The unsung hero of Pagan life: The long-necked lighter. I have one that hangs on the wall next to my altar at all times.
Bell – A dear friend gave me a gorgeous metal bell many years ago that has the loveliest tone; whenever I’m doing something a bit more formal or am cleansing my altar I hold the bell over the surface and ring it once. That baby vibrates energy like nobody’s business!
And that’s pretty much it aside from whatever magical or seasonal accoutrements I have around the altar. The decorative items are very important in their own right; I can change the whole mood of my room and myself just by shifting the colors or seasonal objects. I’m always fiddling about with what’s there.
I suppose I should include my chair as a vital ritual tool since it holds the most important part of all: My big ol’ Witchy booty. After all, tools are only as good as the person using them. A stick is just a stick until you choose to dedicate it as a wand.
And here’s the video I made a couple of years ago showing all my altar stuff. It looks a bit different now but the layout is still the same.
These are the general steps I go through before actually doing a Big Ol’ Spell. (I differentiate between “formal” spells and little magic like hanging herbs by your window or infusing food with happy feelings, since those don’t require a lot in terms of planning and usually don’t require a Circle.)
1. Purpose
When I decide I want to work a spell for something, I start out with defining what it is I really want. For example, do I need fast money for current circumstances, or am I thinking more long-term like new income streams, a new job, et cetera? The answer might be “both,” but I’ve always found it way more effective to deal with one need or desire at a time so I’m not splitting my focus.
For me at least the ethical considerations are very important. I consider decreasing the suffering in the world one of my highest aims, and I do that primarily through my vegan practice, but when I am planning magic I consider who stands to get hurt by my getting my way. Most normal magical purposes are pretty benign, but you want to be sure that the way your desires come to be doesn’t involve, say, your favorite uncle kicking the bucket and leaving you $50,000.
It is absolutely impossible to be a living thing and not destroy other things. But I can still consider who and what is affected by my actions and whether those consequences are okay with my conscience. In the end, though, I can’t see everything that could happen; I have to do the best I can with what I know and be sure to ask for a positive outcome for everyone involved.
2. Oracle
Once I think I know what I want/need, I go to the Tarot or another oracle. I need to get in touch with my subconscious as well as any larger energies that want me to know something. I don’t have a specific reading I always use, but I tend to ask what is underneath my desire, anything else I need to be aware of, and any symbols or imagery I could use. Sometimes the reading totally changes what I intend to do, and sometimes it even stops me from doing anything. But usually by the time I’m done I have a pretty good working plan. If I don’t, I go to:
3. Element
I like to break down subject matter as well as action by element. There are certain types of magical actions that correspond well to a particular element, and certainly most desires do. My basic breakdown is:
Air – Communication, Study, Legalities, Tech stuff (Releasing things into the wind, incense magic)
Fire – Banishing, Creativity, Transformation, Red Hot Monkey Lovin’ (Burning stuff or soaking in the sunlight)
Water – Emotional healing, Swoony heart-eyes Love, Emotional healing, Mental health (Indrinking, bathing, potions and oils, releasing things into running water/the sea )
4. Timing
Much hay is made about when to do magic – by lunar cycles? By astrological alignment? According to days of the week? I say whatever means the most to you. I generally go with the moon cycles, but remember: These are just influences, like many others. Personally I feel that since the Moon has been shown to affect the tides, and I’m made up of 90something percent water, then the Moon is a close enough influence for me to try and work with, not against. There are times that don’t lend themselves well to most forms of magic (Mercury Retrograde comes to mind) but if that whole concept is silly to you, never mind it!
5. Outline
Now, I write out the spell, or at least the steps, in order and then go back in and add details where they are needed. I make a list of tools and ingredients (don’t forget a lighter). I consider wording for the thing. Normally I make it up as I go along, but if you find that tedious or scary you can always go online or in books to find already-written spells for your intention that have good wording…that is if you don’t mind rhyming couplets and people using the word “boon” because it rhymes with “moon.”
I can’t get past that for some reason. Nobody says “boon.”
5. Do the Thing
Yeah, so…now we do the thing. Gather ingredients, create/invoke sacred space in whatever way you prefer (we’ll talk more about this later, it’s too much to include here), and perform the magical operation you have planned.
A lot of Witches refuse to discuss their spellwork beyond the Circle, believing that talking about it blunts the effect. I generally don’t say much because I don’t want people asking me “So how’s that healing spell going? Has the rash cleared up yet?” I prefer to keep recent or ongoing work close to the vest, but I’m usually happy to talk about stuff I’ve done in the past.
That can be really helpful, especially if you do something magical and it doesn’t work. Talking about it might help you figure out why, or ways to change things and try again. Every spell affects the Web in some way, but it might not be in a way that directly benefits you. Sometimes you need to sharpen your focus and have another go.
6. Act in Accordance With Your Spell
You would think this would be a no-brainer, but it tends to be the part people neglect the most. It has been my experience that “manifesting” things out of thin air doesn’t work as well as doing the mystical and then doing the practical. At the very least, you want your spell to affect your outlook on the subject. Inner work is important too, but just be sure and send the email, call the recruiter, curb your spending, actually leave the house…and so on.
It’s a word that tends to make Neopagans and Unitarian Universalists a bit nervous, in no small part because of the long history of the term describing a form of bowing-down, fearful obsequiety that I personally think all religions should cast aside. I suppose if I wanted people to feel comfortable I could say I am devoted to Her, but I’ve decided I’m old enough not to care about making people uncomfortable with my truth.
The word “worship” breaks down into “the state of being worthy of glory, honor, or renown.” It wasn’t used in the sense of paying reverence to a divine or other supernatural being until the 14th century. Nowadays the actual dictionary definition is “the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration for a deity,” with the secondary definition basically devoting that same reverence and adoration to a person or principle in the same way you would a deity, ie, “I worship Tom Ellis’s glorious booty.”
The thing is none of that tells you what worship is like. It doesn’t say how to worship. “reverence or adoration” can take all sorts of forms. The way you were raised to relate to Deity is not the way you, as an adult, have to do. You have the right and the ability to change your relationship with the Mystery.
The reason I use the word is that while I do believe all of creation is Divine, I don’t consider myself equal to Deity. Maybe She’s not omnipotent but I’m way, way less powerful than She. That Divine spark that is Her soul sets electrons to spinning, gravity to pulling, poles to attracting. She is the ultimate cause and reality is the effect. I’m just one round woman with a bad back trying to get my own individual shit together! Really, it’s not even the individual face that I worship, it’s the nameless genderless Force within and beyond all things, but I can’t connect with that on an emotional and spiritual level, so my subconscious gave Her a face and more or less a gender.
(I say more or less because there have been times that She has morphed into something more like a He, and I have a name for that aspect too; we meet occasionally so I can learn more about working with said subconscious and creativity on a deep level. So far he’s shown up as a literary/TV figure, but I know that’s my brain drawing on the meaningful characters in my memory and imagination.)
While I treat spellcraft as a sacred art that involves my connection with Deity, there are other ways we connect that aren’t quite so needy on my part. The three primary avenues I traverse are Devotional Ritual, Prayer, and Meditation. I’ll go into each of these in more depth in its own post, but here is a quick summary.
Devotional Ritual
I wrote about this quite a bit in The Circle Within way back when, and in fact I still use some of the methods I talked about. I distinguish ritual from prayer because for me prayer is much simpler, but for my purposes both of them have the same basic function.
A devotional ritual is one whose primary focus is on celebrating or honoring the natural world or the Goddess Herself. This can overlap with other sorts of ritual and also with the other categories, but for me what distinguishes a ritual from prayer or a spell is complexity. A ritual is made up of more than one smaller ritual – I can sit and pray, but if I also cast a Circle and make an offering, it becomes a full on ritual. A ritual has a defined beginning, middle, and end.
Prayer and Meditation
These aren’t exactly opposites but they are two sides of the same coin. Both can take many forms but the simplest definition I use is: Prayer involves talking to Deity, meditation involves listening to Her. (There are of course many kinds of non-devotional meditation as well.) These two can flow into each other or combine, so, I tend not to draw too many hard lines between the two. Really, it’s more about the “flavor” of what I’m doing than the actual literal words or actions.
Since you’ ve read this far, allow me to reward you with a picture of my cat, as is the purpose of the Internet.
Strap in, this is gonna get a little wordy. I’m not going to cut too much though because this is important.
I used to be your bog-standard Wiccan duotheist – God and Goddess, Moon and Sun, all that stuff. Before that, I spent time as what we used to call Dianic (I have no idea if that’s still the term) meaning I only revered the Goddess. I was influenced by a series of novels that still affect my spirituality today (The Strands of Starlight series by Gael Baudino).
By the time I was working in a coven I’d returned to duotheism, and for a long time had a relationship with a particular face of the God, whom I called Jeff (just for expediency among humans since He didn’t really have a name). I also had a yearlong experience with a dark face of the Goddess that started out amazing but ended very badly.
When I wrote The Circle Within I espoused a form of panentheism, although I didn’t know the word yet (people were very happy to tell me after the book was published, lol). I described it as the belief that Deity is within the universe as well as outside it – that everything is Deity, that nothing can be disconnected from Them because we They are us and everything beyond us.
In the years leading up to my return to Paganism and my adoption of Unitarian Universalism, I went through all the usual questions and doubts one does when one is a thoughtful believer in a dark decade of the soul. Is God good? How do you account for suffering? Do we really have free will? And so on. I wasn’t satisfied with any of the answers, let alone how they would apply to duotheist Paganism (which was quickly distilling back down into something more like monotheism).
Then, quite unexpectedly, thanks to my UU minister, I ran headfirst into Process Theology, and realized that, holy shit, it has a name!
I won’t go too deeply into the subject as it would become very dry very quickly, but I have come up with my own take on it that adds in more personal stuff I’ve experienced. I’m still exploring the entirety of process theology, but the basic concepts have helped me to crystallize a lot of what I already felt about how the sacred works.
The essence is this: Deity is a verb more than they’re a noun. Revelation and creation are continuous, and that Web I mentioned in the post about “what is magic” – the Web that is all possibilities and probabilities – is the Goddess’s being (Or God, or Goddess/God, whatever lights your candle). Since She is that Web, and the Web is in constant flux, that means deity also evolves. It does so through us and through creation. In a universe like this we are subject to a lot of circumstances based on our lives intersecting with others, but all beings have some creative freedom or free will. We simply don’t act in a vacuum where free will is so cut-and-dried.
Deity in my way of thinking has a different character from the mainstream – She is by nature benevolent, but not omnipotent or perfect. Omnipresent, and omniscient more or less, yes, but as Her creation is a process that never ends, that means She is subject to the Web as much as we are. This helps me settle the question of whether or not God is good – to me, I’ve always sensed Her as loving, even if it’s not always pretty, but with the evil in the world I couldn’t reconcile Her nature with reality. Looking at it from this angle I can.
She knows everything that is happening in the Web at every moment, including the millions of possible outcomes for our choices, but because we have freedom, She can’t know which of those possibilities we will choose until we choose them.
She may not be omnipotent, but she’s still pretty damn potent – Deity works primarily through influence, showing us beauty and joy and love and the value of compassion to encourage us to choose those paths, rather than thundering down domination or intimidation. She doesn’t force us to do anything. Therefore the answer to “God, why do you allow suffering to exist?” is, “Well…why do you?” Humanity didn’t wake up one day and decide the world should be like this. Millions of choices got us here. That same divine creative freedom is the only thing that can save us.
There is an element of randomness at work in things as well; in most cases you can trace how something happened back through the choices of the people connected to it, but sometimes rocks fall and everyone dies. The chain of events that led those rocks to fall is far too long or distant for us to see, but She sees. There is causality for everything, but not necessarily inherent meaning. Humans are the meaning-makers, so it’s our job to take what happens in our lives and make it mean something to us.
All of this is very brain-intensive, and that may lead you to think my relationship with the Eternal Unfolding is something purely intellectual, but you’d be mistaken. She speaks and moves through everything that exists and through all our potential and creativity. We can work together to shift the waking world in ways that are positive and benefit myself and others.
Deity itself is formless, genderless, faceless; but They are more than happy to enter into symbols and images humans have created so that we can relate to it. To my view that means your god could be YWVH or Thor or Quan Yin or David Bowie or Dream of the Endless or all of those at once; they all stand for the same force, and act kind of like an icon in that the picture you click on connects you to something a lot bigger.
Relationship is key in process philosophy and theology. We exist in a web, remember, not each dangling at the end of a single string. In this sense God is also in how we treat each other, how we interact, and how we codepend. All beings live in relationship; that includes humans and nonhumans. Everyone contributes to the Web and makes small changes with their lives that can ripple into big changes. Everyone is inherently worthy and of value.
I’m sure there are plenty of nice theological arguments against the way I see things, but honestly? I don’t give a damn. I’m learning as I go, experimenting and experiencing. This way of looking at Deity and the universe makes sense to me and to my spirit. I feel like if it’s a positive influence on my life and helps me to grow, who the hell cares if God is one or two or the Seven Dwarfs? In the end, someone’s belief about God is less important to the larger world as someone’s behavior based on what their God persuades them to do.
She wants to see you be brave.
As for my Goddess? She is essentially dual – one dark half, one light, each governing different times of year. The two facets bleed into each other quite a bit. There’s not a hard division. I separate the two just to give me a more useful seasonal calendar. Most of the time we meet in a forest during either a Full or New Moon, and in that place the sky swirls around like the Aurora Borealis combined with Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. What does She look like? Honestly? Kind of like Sara Bareilles.
If this sounds a lot like the Persephone in the Shadow World series, well…it should. The books and my life draw from each other. The Web, the Forest of Spirits…yeah, that’s all “real.” Did I make it up? Hell yeah I did. But as I was getting into the symbolism in the novels, those images began to bleed over into my practice, and finally I realized that She had been there all along, waiting for me to put it all together. The “real” one isn’t a vampire goddess, of course, but hey, Nobody’s perfect.
Now let’s explore how the 7 Principles of Unitarian Universalism interact with Pagan beliefs and ethics. You don’t have to dive too deeply to see how compatible the two are.
1st Principle: The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
2nd Principle: Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
3rd Principle: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
4th Principle: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
5th Principle: The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
6th Principle: The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
7th Principle: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
There is also an 8th Principle in the process of becoming an official thing: Journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.
As a progressive, a feminist, and a proponent of process theology, the 1st and 2nd Principles are kind of a given. Even a terrible person is a person with the same right to exist with dignity as I have, and they became what they are both by their own choices/mistakes and by the systems and institutions that helped them become that way. That’s just reality, not an excuse; but knowing how a toddler got a gun doesn’t stop you from taking the gun away, does it?
We all have some measure of creative freedom in our lives. Principle #2 points out that our lives exist in relationship with others (meaning everything and everyone we interact with, human or otherwise), and (in my set of values) the only way to live within the Divine Web is to make sure our relationships involve justice, equity, and compassion.
The 3rd Principle is one of the things that drew me to UU in the first place: As I said before, you can believe in whatever suits you as a UU, or nothing at all, as long as you share our values and are willing to work together with your fellow travelers to keep nudging that long arc toward justice. With that plurality of belief comes the importance of Principle 4: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning. To me this means learning all you can about the varied ways humans interact with the Divine Web (free), but also respecting the practices of other faiths and cultures (responsible). Cultural appropriation has historically been an issue in UU congregations as much as it has in Wicca and other NeoPagan traditions but both are working to address it.
If you’re an anarchist at heart the 5th Principle may rankle, but then again, you’d be less likely to consider joining a church in the first place, right? UUs believe in the democratic process, though we acknowledge its flaws and how, in practice, it has become so corrupt in America in particular. But it still seems like one of the best systems going, so as long as the system can be changed for the better, we’re all up in it.
When it comes to Principle 6 I don’t know of any NeoPagan tradition that believes in racism, misogyny, environmental degredation, and homophobia. But although I’ve never encountered an entire trad that held these beliefs but I have seen individuals and groups within the trad that did. I usually refuse to call any path “wrong,” but if your religion does promote any of these things, it is WRONG. WRONG WRONG WRONG. It needs to go sit in its little circle of wrongness and be WRONG and stay away from me and mine.
When we bring in the 8th Principle – in a word, antiracism – we really dig into our philosophies on justice and liberty. Just as a lot of people don’t think legislation protecting women’s rights is necessary because the Constitution “already covers everyone,” there are people who think the 8th Principle is redundant based on the other already-existing principles. But in truth, racism is so endemic to our society that you can’t just *say* everyone is equal and have it come true. In our culture we have to actively work to create systems that are antiracist. If deep down you believe in the American promise of equality and freedom, then looking around you must see we have neither, and it is our responsibility (everyone’s!) to change this.
Ask the average (hahaha) Pagan UU which Principle they like best and many will probably say the Seventh, Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. The contributions of Earth-based religions weren’t part of the earliest versions of Unitarian Universalism, but unlike a number of other faiths UUs are quite pleased to evolve with the times, so Pagan ideas about nature became one of the primary sources for UU wisdom. The more intensely climate change ravages the planet the more important the 7th Principle becomes. #7 also fits in nicely with my own concept of Deity and the universe – at the moment I call it the Divine Web – which governs every form of connection I have with, well, everything. I’ll get more into the Web in a later post since it’s the fundamental metaphor of my personal tradition, but suffice it to say, I would have to name #7 as a favorite too.
